10/20/2009

The AP has obtained documents confirming that the Swiss Federal Office of Justice sent a fax on September 22 alerting the US Office of International Affairs that Polanski was due to travel to Zurich to attend a film festival tribute to his work. The Swiss correspondence inquired as to whether US authorities would be submitting a request for Polanski’s arrest.

Might throw a monkey wrench in one or two conspiracy theories about my office, huh?

P.S. Many people have e-mailed me about stories saying that Polanski has been moved to a hospital for treatment of an undisclosed ailment, and/or that the Swiss officially ruled today that he will not be granted bail. I didn’t see either as a particularly big story, but in case you missed those facts, there you go.

For all who claim there is no evidence voter fraud impacts elections, Fox News reports the Rensselaer County Board of Elections in Troy, N.Y., has found 38 bogus ballots that an election official acknowledges likely tipped city and county elections to the Democrats:

“Thirty-eight forged or fraudulent ballots have been thrown out — enough votes, an election official admits, to likely have tipped the city council and county elections in November to the Democrats. Candidates would have been able to run both on the Democratic and Working Families Party lines in two weeks, and that could have given the Democrats the general election.

A special prosecutor is investigating the case and criminal charges are possible. New York State Supreme Court Judge Michael Lynch ruled that there were “significant election law violations that have compromised the rights of numerous voters and the integrity of the election process.””

New York Republicans and Democrats blame the Working Families Party for the ballots, a group that has ties to ACORN and even the White House:

“The Working Families Party has recently gained strength, and controversy, in New York. Republican and Democratic candidates in the Empire State can also run on third party lines, such as the Working Families Party, as well as the Liberal, Conservative, and Independence parties, among others. The extra line means extra votes that could bring victory.

Hillary Clinton garnered 2.7 percent of her total votes from the WFP line when she first ran for Senate in 2000, which increased to 5 percent of her total vote in 2006. In September, Clinton’s former campaign manager for her 2000 Senate run, New York City Councilman Bill DeBlasio, who has been endorsed by the WFP, beat two long-established politicians in the Democratic primary. Critics also accuse the Working Families Party of having a long association with the troubled activist group, ACORN. Bertha Lewis, ACORN’s CEO, is one of the party’s co-founders. The New York Times reported this month that “Patrick Gaspard, the White House political director, worked with ACORN in New York to set up the Working Families political party and sat on the party’s board with Ms. Lewis.”

One Democratic Congressional chairman is reportedly so upset that Republican committee members won’t agree to ignore sweetheart deals with Countrywide Mortgage that he resorted to locking Republicans out of the meeting room:

“Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) locked Republicans out of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee room to keep them from meeting when Democrats aren’t present.

Towns’ action came after repeated public ridicule from the leading Republican on the committee, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), over Towns’s failure to launch an investigation into Countrywide Mortgage’s reported sweetheart deals to VIPs.”

The lock-out followed a GOP staffers’ video showing the Democrats refusing to meet for a vote on Countrywide subpoenas and then leaving through a back door:

The Major League Baseball playoffs are underway. The Yankees lead the Angels 2-1 in the ALCS and they are playing now. The teams are scoreless in the third inning.

Meanwhile, the Dodgers and Philly play tomorrow in the NLCS. The Phillies lead 3-1 after Monday’s come-from-behind win in the 9th inning. Someone should remind the Dodger’s Manny Ramirez that there is no “I” in “Team”:

“As Jimmy Rollins turned on a Jonathan Broxton fastball with two outs in the ninth inning Monday night and drove in two runs for a 5-4 Philadelphia victory, Manny was blissfully unaware that his season was one game from being over. He’d been removed for defensive purposes before the inning began.

“When I came out,” he told reporters, “they were turning the TVs off and everybody was coming in.”

Instead of being on the bench to celebrate the presumed victory – and, eventually, lament the crushing loss – he was rinsing off and getting ready to towel himself dry.”

“Instead of working through the Chamber, President Obama has reached out to business executives, meeting repeatedly with small groups of CEOs in his private White House dining room. He also has dispatched top aides Valerie Jarrett and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel to corporate boardrooms. Since the summer, the three have met with some of the biggest names in the business community, including the heads of IBM, Wal-Mart Stores, Time Warner, Eastman Kodak, Starbucks, Amazon.com and Coca-Cola.

In the process, Obama is attempting to rewrite the rules of the game in Washington, where the Chamber and other business lobbying groups have long held a highly visible, and powerful, place at the intersection of policy and politics. “

Fox News’ James Rosen also reported today (no link available) that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said the U.S. Chamber of Commerce “scares the [bleep] out of” him. I know how Emanuel feels. Obama’s policies do the same for me.

Michelle Malkin reports that ACORN/Project Vote is suing their former development associate, Anita MonCrief, for blowing the whistle on their less-than-savory activities and associations. She has all of the legal docs available for review in the case, which was to be expected following ACORN’s suit against Hannah Giles, James O’Keefe, and Andrew Breitbart, for exposing corruption within ACORN’s offices throughout the country. Ms. M also has links to the defense funds for all four, should you wish to keep sticking it to ACORN.

The Illinois Democrat, appointed by disgraced former Gov. Rod Blagojevich, says he’ll only vote for a bill to provide health care to millions more Americans as long as it allows the government to sell insurance in competition with private insurers.

And he says he won’t compromise.

***

No, he says, he will not vote for any version of a government-run plan circulating in the Senate, other than the full-blown one from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

He won’t vote, for example, for Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe’s idea to use the threat of a public option to force insurers to lower premiums by certain deadlines. He hasn’t seen the details of another idea, proposed by Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., that would allow each state to decide whether to offer public coverage to compete with private insurers. The health committee’s proposal, he says, must be in the final bill to earn his vote.

To grasp just how uncompromising that is, consider that Burris has just taken a more hardcore position on the HELP version of the “public option” than HELP Chairman Tom Harkin.

Burris would not say if he’d vote against cloture on a bill that leaves out the public plan, a possibility that could stall debate on the legislation.

Of course, if push comes to shove, Burris will receive the appropriate parting gift from the very Democrats who opposed seating him — but then flip-flopped, because they needed another Democrat in the Senate. So this headache is probably a smaller one than the possibility of Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) doing in ObamaCare. But that doesn’t make the story any less funny.

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